In 1892 Loïe Fuller, often figured as one of the “mothers” of modern dance, brought an infringement suit in New York against a chorus girl named Minnie Renwood Bemis in an attempt to enjoin Bemis from performing a version of the Serpentine Dance, which Fuller claimed to have invented. The dance, distinctive for its use of yards of illuminated silk fabric, made the American-born Fuller famous in Europe and spawned a host of imitators on both sides of the Atlantic.

Intent on staking her proprietary claim on the dance, Fuller took the precaution of submitting a written description of it to the U. S. Copyright Office. Ultimately, however, the judge for the U.S. Circuit Court denied Fuller's request for an injunction on the grounds that the Serpentine Dance told no story and was therefore not eligible for copyright protection. Although Fuller clearly regarded her expressive output as intellectual property, dance at the time lacked legal recognition as a copyrightable category in its own right and merited protection only if it qualified as a “dramatic” or “dramatico-musical composition.”

Reconstructing and citing historical dance pieces as well as making the dance stage a site for archiving dance performatively have become major trends in contemporary dance (as this issue of DRJ demonstrates). Contemporary choreographers have left behind the incessant striving to create new movements and instead are engaging in dialogue with the past. While the “avant-garde” in Western stage dance was once perceived as embodying the “new” and was believed to be different from dance forms considered marked by tradition, these demarcations are now being challenged by both dance historians and artists (Franko and Richards 2000; Burt 2003). What's more, reenactments increasingly destabilize distinctions between the artistic and academic fields as they highlight the performative nature of “doing history” and present modes of research that involve lectures, texts, and documentation in a stage setting. As such, the past is a playground for the present—a notion of history that is also encouraged academically by a critical historiography that reflects on the narrative structures implicit in doing dance history (White 1990; Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999). History as well as the act of memory are now considered a process that “constitutes, stages, re-stages, and constantly modifies its object while simultaneously creating new models and media of commemorating” (Fischer-Lichte and Lehnert 2000, 14; my translation).

Dance is virtually always music-and-dance, unavoidably interdisciplinary and ready for “marriage,” or so the familiar metaphor tells us (Du Manoir 1664/1985; Humphrey 1959, 164). Apart from a few notable exceptions from within modern dance—like the silent dances of the 1920s and 1930s or the flamboyant rejections of musical tyranny by Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer from midcentury—the centrality of music within dance and the “musicality” of the dancer have long been considered unquestioned facts of life.

Yet traditionally, there have been fundamental differences in practice and conceptual frameworks between these two art forms or (within the academy) “disciplines.” Music has a history of being thought “alone” and uncontaminated by matter outside itself. Often, it needs no other partner. Then, in dance, the performer is central—as Yeats famously wrote: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”—while in music, the score object, written by a composer, has been central and the performer, until quite recendy, relatively marginalized.

The dancer, Xavier Le Roy, walks with a calm yet deliberate pace across the empty stage toward its center, where he stops, with his back facing the audience. He slowly lifts his arms in front of him and, after a brief moment of suspension, makes a hand gesture, as focused as unexpected, as if channeling a stream of intensities—a gesture to which the music responds. Echoing Le Roy's movement, Igor Stravinsky's most notorious score, Le Sacre du Printemps, begins its first notes. The performer goes on gently whisking the air, with a fluid yet measured pace, and thus engages an uncanny dialogue with the recorded symphony by conducting the seemingly empty space before him.

The first time I saw films of the Wigman solos on video, I experienced a vague, ambivalent feeling of recognition: something in these dances felt very familiar, although the choreography retained its historical strangeness seen through the eyes of a contemporary dance student. The uncanniness of the experience functioned as a powerful trigger to think about something that concerned me but that at first I couldn't fully understand. For one thing, it made me think of my dance education in Ecuador, and it occurred to me that there could well be significant similarities between Ausdruckstanz and Ecuadorian modern dance (I shall develop this idea at the end of this essay). In a personal research project in 2007, while studying at P.A.R.T.S. between 2004 and 2008, I learned and performed three of Wigman's solos: Seraphisches Lied, Pastorale, and Sommerlicher Tanz, from Mary Wigman's dance cycle Schwingende Landschaft. At that time I realized I was dealing with a totally different physicality for which my contemporary training was insufficient, and I had to seek different technical tools in order to perform these solos. First, I realized I had to develop other modes of muscular tension, as my training in release techniques did not suffice. Second, I was bound to consider movement not purely as a physical activity (I imagine that Wigman would have dismissed such an option as mere gymnastics) but rather as a tool for expressing a subtext. Despite these insights, my approach remained rather vague. The mere knowledge that I was dealing with a different physicality and mental involvement did not enable me to define them accurately.

To reenact nine solos Mary Wigman performed during her first U.S. tour (1930–31), Fabian Barba establishes a contract with the audience based on representational codes of modernist dance in the early twentieth century. As one enters the theater, a little program is found on one's seat with the intended course of the evening. The program mentions the place and date of the reenactment—in German, with an English translation, as it might have been during the American tours—but not the year. Reading it, we learn that six solos, Aus dem Tanzcyklus “Schwingende Landschaft” (From the Dance Cycle “Shifting Landscape“), dated 1929, will be performed. There will be an eight-minute intermission after which three other solos are to follow: two from Visions and one from Celebration. The program is printed in the typography of those days and the contractual agreement of the dance concert—written in small letters as is usually the case with contracts—is indicated at the bottom: “The audience is kindly asked not to leave the room during the intermission. At the end of the recital and upon demand from the public, two dances can be shown again as ‘encores.’”